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Italian police arrest 19 in migrant trafficking probe
The Associated Press
Posted: Dec 05, 2020 7:52 AM ET
Migrants board a coast guard ship that will take them to a ferry moored off Lampedusa island, Italy on Sept. 5 , 2020.
Italian officials have used chartered ferries and put other measures into place to fight severe overcrowding at
migrant centres on the tiny island of Lampedusa. (Mauro Seminara/The Associated Press)
Italian police on Saturday arrested 19 suspects, dismantling what authorities say was a criminal organization that moved migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan to Italy and then into northern Europe.
The investigation, led by prosecutors in Catania, Sicily, unveiled a network that involved hired or stolen sailboats transporting migrants via Turkey and Greece to Italy. Some then travelled north to the French border and were smuggled by vehicle into France, thanks to human smugglers based in border towns, police said in a statement.
The arrested suspects included Iraqi Kurds, Afghans and Italians, police said.
One of the alleged ring's bases was in Bari, southern Italy, where false documents were issued indicating the migrants had housing, a requirement for residency permits. Other bases were in Milan and Turin in northern Italy as well as in the town of Ventimiglia, near the French border.
Others allegedly involved in the scheme falsified work contracts so the migrants could successfully apply for permission to reside in Italy, authorities said.
The investigation began in 2018, triggered by the arrival of 10 boats near the eastern Sicilian city of Syracuse. The boats had sailed from Turkey and Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean, and not from Libya, from where for years the majority of the hundreds of thousands of migrants had set out for Italy in traffickers' unseaworthy vessels.
The investigation ascertained the activities of a network of Italians and foreigners, most of the latter holding residency permits issued on grounds of international protection, the police said. The ring was "dedicated to facilitating the entrance, stay and transit toward northern Europe of migrants coming from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."
One suspect, police said, was about to transport migrants from the railroad station at Ventimiglia into France, one of the preferred destination countries for those being smuggled.
Skippers who were engaged to sail the boats to Sicily were paid about 800 euros ($1,200 Cdn) per crossing, while migrants each paid about 6,000 euros ($9,300 Cdn) to be smuggled from Asia, via Turkey and Greece, into Italy, the police said. The smuggling ring cracked by Italian authorities was an "essential link of connection with criminal groups active in Turkey and Greece," police said.
Almost 800 incidents of ‘threats & terrorism justification’ reported in France over month during tributes to beheaded teacher
44 students permanently expelled
6 Dec 2020 22:53
FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Benoit Tessier
Tributes to the slain teacher, Samuel Paty, have been disturbed by nearly 800 incidents ranging from threats to outright justification of terrorism over the past months, the French Education Ministry has said.
The murder of a schoolteacher continues to send shockwaves through France. The killing that took place in mid-October has given rise to a whole series of disturbing incidents in various French education facilities throughout November, the nation’s education ministry revealed in a recent report.
Almost 800 times minutes of silence held in honor of the teacher were disrupted by various incidents in November, the report says. More than a half of all cases took place during the initial commemorative ceremonies held on November 2 and 3. Additional incidents happened during the rest of the month.
Nearly half of all incidents took place in colleges while almost a quarter involved primary schools. The vast majority of such acts was committed by students while parents were involved in more than seven percent of all cases. Sometimes, the ceremonies were disrupted by third parties, including one municipal staff member.
One fifth of all cases were described by the ministry as “provocations” while another 20% referred to the cases when people thought a minute of silence was a good time to start a discussion. Twelve percent of cases saw students refusing to participate in the event. However, sometimes the incidents were much more serious as 17 percent of the cases involve open justification of terrorism and another five percent included “threats.”
Suspensions and expulsions
As a result, 286 reports were filed with the police and 136 complaints were filed with the public prosecutor’s offices. More than 130 students were temporary suspended from studies and 44 were “permanently expelled.”
Samuel Paty was beheaded by a radicalized Chechen refugee after the teacher showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed as part of a lesson on free speech. His killing was followed by a series of terrorist attacks in France and beyond. Nearly two weeks later, three people were killed in a knife attack in Nice.
Following the teacher’s killing and other incidents attributed to religious extremism, the French government introduced a plan to crack down on religious radicalism. A mosque accused of inciting the hate that led to Paty’s murder was closed at the end of October. Nearly 80 other mosques across France were flagged as potential security threats and now face potential closure.
The legislation proposed by the government also involves stricter control over children’s education. Under the new rules, each child in France would be given an identification number that would be used to ensure that they are attending school. Parents who prevent their children from attending the education facilities could face fines or jail time. The measures are to be applied to all children regardless of their religious or any other background. The bill is expected to be reviewed by the government next week.
Bangladesh: Bangabandhu statue vandals in Kushtia are ‘from a madrasa’
Senior Correspondent, bdnews24.com
Published: 06 Dec 2020, 08:31 PM BdST
Police have detained two students and two teachers of a local madrasa over the vandalism of an under-construction sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Kushtia.
The detainees are Abu Bakr and Md Sabuj Islam Nahid, students of Ibne Masud Madrasa at Jugia Poshchimpara in the town, and teachers Al Amin and Yusuf Ali.
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal revealed the information to journalists at the Secretariat in Dhaka on Sunday after the police said they had identified two vandals from security camera footage. “If someone thinks they have become very powerful, they are wrong,” he said amid a clamour from Islamic extremists to stop building statues of the Father of the Nation.
Students Bakr and Nahid were the men seen defacing the statue in the footage, said Khandaker Mohiuddin, deputy inspector general of police.
The men, clad in Panjabis and skull caps, could be seen walking towards the under-construction statue before climbing up a ladder and defacing it around 2am Saturday.
“They used hammers under the cover of the night. They got out of Ibne Masud Madrasa to do this (vandalism),” said the home minister.
The Kushtia Municipality took the initiative to build three statues of Bangabandhu at the site. Work on the statue targeted by the vandals was almost complete. The right hand, face and parts of the left hand of the statue at a five-road intersection in Kushtia Municipality were damaged by the miscreants.
The act of vandalism has drawn howls of protests from different groups and organisations after it came to their notice on Saturday morning.
‘HIFAZAT MISLEADING YOUTHS’
The home minister said leading youths onto the street by inciting them with false information is “unacceptable”. “We will look into the issue,” he said.
He warned the Islamist leaders of Hifazat-e Islam and other groups who have threatened to tear down Bangabandhu’s statues.
“We, who are in charge of ensuring peace, won’t allow anarchy or vandalism,” he said. A certain quarter is running a disinformation campaign on social media, according to him.
“I saw a little boy claiming on Facebook that Hifazat sacrificed more blood than the freedom fighters did in the Liberation War. They are drilling false, misleading information into the heads of the youth,” Kamal said.
Hifazat conducted mayhem in Dhaka’s Motijheel on May 5, 2013 for several demands, including punishment to “atheist bloggers” after Shahbagh-based Ganajagaran Mancha launched movement for capital punishment of all war criminals.
The radical Islamist group said a number of its supporters were killed in clashes with the law enforcers on that day, but could not prove it. “We had asked them to send us a list of the people (said to be killed) with names of their madrasas and addresses. We haven’t got the list yet. This is the reality,” he said.
A reporter asked him whether the Hifazat leadership will face legal action as instigators of the vandalism in Kushtia. The home minister responded that it will depend on the investigation. “All those whose name will come up in the investigation will be made accused,” he said.
He declined to comment on whether the government will accept Hifazat’s demand for a halt on the construction of a statue of the Father of the Nation in Dhaka’s Dholaipar to mark his birth centenary.
The plan angered the Hifazat leaders who subsequently expressed opposition to all sculpture in the Muslim-majority country. “It depends on the government whether it will review its decision. We (home ministry) will do our job of ensuring security,” he said.
“Bangabandhu is the Father of the Nation, the greatest Bengali of all time. The people will never accept that his memory will not be preserved,” Kamal said.
Kushtia, BD
France, Belgium and Austria move into the frontline of a battle
for the soul of Islam
Written By: James M Dorsey WION
New Delhi, Delhi, India
Published: Dec 06, 2020, 02.45 PM(IST)
UAE flag Photograph:( Reuters )
The UAE’s footprint is visible across the globe, most recently in France, the latest arena in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam, as well as in US disclosures about the nature of Emirati intervention in Libya.
Punching above its weight, the United Arab Emirates is wielding a combination of religious soft power, commercial and economic sway, and hard power in its bid to counter political Islam in ways that potentially could threaten pillars of Western democracy as well as US and European strategic interests.
The UAE’s footprint is visible across the globe, most recently in France, the latest arena in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam, as well as in US disclosures about the nature of Emirati intervention in Libya.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia appear to have been lobbying for a tougher French policy towards political Islam prior to the crackdown initiated by President Emmanuel Macron in the wake of the gruesome killing of a schoolteacher in September and subsequent attacks, including on a church in Nice.
The lobbying, emphasising common interests in countering political Islam and Turkey, with which France is at odds in Libya and the eastern Mediterranean as well as on the issue of political Islam, aligned themselves neatly with Macron’s domestic and international agenda.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia in effect gave the French leader welcome Muslim cover to target political Islam and Turkey more than six months before the attacks this fall as he gears up for an election in 2022 in which Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far right, nationalist and anti-immigration National Rally, looms large.
Speaking in the French city of Mulhouse in February, Macron laid out his strategy to combat political Islam represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists who in his words insist that Islam’s legal code supersedes the laws of the French Republic and emphasise what he calls “Islamist separatism” and “Islamist supremacy.” The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both declared the brotherhood a terrorist organisation.
Austria last month started cracking down on the brotherhood following a shooting rampage in the heart of Vienna in which four people were killed.
Kuwait and Qatar are funding the construction of an Islamic religious and cultural centre in Mulhouse. The UAE and Saudi Arabia alongside Bahrain and Egypt have been boycotting Qatar economically and diplomatically since 2017, alleging that the Gulf state is a prime supporter of Islamist groups.
Some Islamist expectations for France
“In the Republic we cannot accept that we refuse to shake hands with a woman because she is a woman. In the Republic, we cannot accept that someone refuses to be treated or educated by someone because she is a woman. In the Republic, one cannot accept school dropouts for religious or belief reasons. In the Republic, one cannot require certificates of virginity to marry,” Macron said.
Qatar has backed the brotherhood in the past and is home to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely viewed as a one of the foremost influencers of the Brotherhood, a catch-all for a multitude of aligned Islamist groups that bicker among themselves.
The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as mediator Kuwait expressed hope in recent days that talks in advance of a Gulf summit in Riyadh later this month would produce at least a first step towards an end of the boycott.
Macron’s crackdown involves tighter legal control of Muslim organisations and aims to centralise the formation and accreditation of Muslim religious leaders in the country.
Critics, including United Nations experts, charge that a new security law introduced in parliament undermines democratic freedoms by implicitly targeting Muslims, imposing a wider ban on home schooling and controls on religious, sporting and cultural associations, and introducing degrees of surveillance and limits on freedom of expression.
Macron “does not want to see Muslims ghettoized in the West and he is right. They should be better integrated into society. The French state has the right to explore ways to achieve that,” UAE minister of state for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash said in November.
Playing on Macron’s differences with Turkey that are shared by the UAE, Gargash suggested that the French president was drawing a line in the sand for his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It is only when he is shown the red line that he shows himself ready to negotiate," Gargash asserted.
Mohammed al-Issa, head of the Muslim World League, a one-time major vehicle for the global propagation of past Saudi ultra-conservatism that now projects the kingdom’s undefined notion of moderate Islam, insisted last month that the law would defend French secularism against Islamic radicalism.
Speaking earlier at an inter-faith conference in Paris co-hosted by the League, Al-Issa stressed that religion needed to be protected from political exploitation to safeguard youth against extremist groups.
Much of Macron’s thinking appears to be informed by French Muslims who maintain close contact with both the French and Emirati governments.
Hakim El Karoui, the French-born son of an anthropologist of Islamic law and nephew of a former Tunisian prime minister, has long advocated notions of a French Islam that are reflected in Mr. Macron’s thinking.
This includes an undifferentiated view of political Islam, the notion of Islamists being secessionists or separatists, and the belief that Middle Eastern funding and political manipulation of faith rather than of domestic and economic factors primarily drive support for political Islam.
An advisor to former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, university lecturer, investment banker, geographer and author of several reports on Islam in France, El Karoui has long projected the UAE as a model of best practice in countering political Islam and fostering a moderate form of the faith.
The UAE promotes a concept of state-controlled Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler.
Yeah, like that's going to happen in France!
“I think that France and the UAE must engage more in a religious debate. The positions of the moderate Muslims in France can be close to the ones of the UAE,” El Karoui told an Abu Dhabi-based newspaper in 2018.
French Middle East scholar Francois Burgat noted in an interview that “arguments put forth by El Karoui are enthusiastically embraced by authoritarian leaders in the Muslim world. They absolve them from responsibility for problems in their own societies.”
Macron’s UAE and Saudi-backed campaign is producing unintended advantages for the two Gulf states in their battle for the soul of Islam. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are in competition with one another but also frequently see their interests aligned.
In a parallel development, the Belgian government, acting on the advice of security services, this month rejected a request of the once Muslim World League-controlled Grand Mosque in central Brussels to be recognized as a faith community.
Justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne said the application had been rejected because agents of the intelligence service of Morocco, a competitor for ownership of the definition of a moderate form of Islam in Europe and West Africa, had gained control of the mosque since Saudi Arabia handed it back to the government in 2018.
“I cannot and will not accept that foreign regimes hijack Islam for ideological or political motives, try to call the shots here and prevent Muslims in our country from developing their own progressive Islam,” Van Quickenborne said, echoing Macron’s approach.
(Dr James M Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.)
Mafia Becomes a Partner in Turkey's Islamist-Far-Right
Governing Coalition
by Abdullah Bozkurt
Nordic Monitor
December 1, 2020
The originally published version of this article, titled "Mafia Becomes a Partner in Islamist and Far-right Alliance in the Governance of Turkey," features downloadable supporting documentation.
Alaattin Çakıcı (right), Turkey's most notorious mafia boss recently released from prison, poses in June 2020
with Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a major partner
in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling coalition.
Alaattin Çakıcı, Turkey's most notorious mafia leader who was convicted and served time on multiple charges from organized crime to drug trafficking, has now become part of the de facto coalition government in Turkey run by a trio of Islamists, far-right elements and neo-nationalists.
The mob boss, after his recent release from prison thanks to a government amnesty, has been trying to improve his public profile, commenting on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues and openly threatening critics of the government. Çakıcı's background in the far right Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar or Ülkü Ocakları, as they are known in Turkish) and his secret missions overseas suggest Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies want to put a known crime machine at work running an intimidation campaign both at home and abroad.
Çakıcı, now 67, had worked with Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) since 1987 in running clandestine operations both in Turkey and abroad before he was detained in France. He served a six-month sentence in Nice before being extradited to Turkey in December 1999 and is now back at the center of politics. He was involved in carrying out unsolved murders on behalf of dark forces nested in the security and intelligence branches of the government.
Erdoğan has turned to mafia groups to intimidate opponents
and sustain a climate of fear.
As the rule of law has effectively been suspended in Turkey in recent years, the Islamist government of Erdoğan and its nationalist partners has turned to mafia groups to run the country, intimidate opponents and sustain a climate of fear. Since his release from prison on April 16, 2020 by an amnesty secured by the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and endorsed by Erdoğan, Çakıcı has been busy in consolidating various mafia groups on behalf of the government and issuing threats to opposition politicians.
There is much more on this story. Please visit the link at the top of this story.
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